Behold the Dreamers(64)
“By the grace of God, sir, we will all be okay soon.”
Clark picked up the Wall Street Journal lying next to him. After a few minutes of reading it, he lifted up his head and looked at Jende. “You should tell her that she lost weight,” he said. “She’ll be glad to hear that.”
Jende smiled. “Maybe I will, sir,” he replied. “Mrs. Edwards is a good woman.”
“Yeah,” Clark said, returning to his newspaper. “She’s a good woman.”
Thirty-two
TWICE A DAY, DURING HIS LUNCH BREAK AND BEFORE PARKING THE CAR FOR the day, he wrote down everything he thought Cindy would love to read: benign information, banal rundowns. He provided details that were far from necessary; included times, locations, and names that served no purpose; added descriptions of people whose actions and behaviors contributed nothing to the narrative. This was his first chance to write something on a daily basis since his student days at National Comprehensive, so he took the opportunity to employ phrases and expressions he hadn’t found a way to use in everyday conversation; throw in words he’d learned from reading the dictionary he’d owned since secondary school; display sentences and tenses he’d picked up from the newspaper and which he hoped would be proof to the madam that he was thinking carefully as he wrote.
On a Tuesday afternoon, he wrote:
Pick Mr. Edwards up at 7:05, but the slow traffic discombobulated Mr. Edwards because he has meeting at 7:45. Drop Mr. Edwards at work at 7:42. Before when we were still in the car, he call his new secretary (I continue to forget her name) and tell her he was going to be late. When I drop him in front of the office, a black woman wearing a suit is outside. It looks like she just comes out of a car too. I see her and Mr. Edwards say hi to one another and then walk into the office together. I have seen this woman before. My brain cells fire around all day and I remember where I saw her. She used to work at Lehman too. It is 2:30 now and I have not seen Mr. Edwards because he demarcate this whole time to be in the office.
On a Friday evening, after driving Clark from the Chelsea Hotel to the office, he wrote:
At 4:00 Mr. Edwards and I leave Washington, D.C. He gets plenty of phone call but nothing sounds chary and fishy. Everything sounds like work. Someone who he says this to, another person who he says that to. Different work things. I do not talk to him all the way back for fear of uttering disturbances to him. When we return to the city, it is after 8:00. I drive him to his gym. He gets out of the gym at 10:00 and then I drive him to work.
As often as he could, he put the gym in place of the Chelsea Hotel, but in the weeks when Clark went to the hotel more than twice, he concocted other reasons, something novel every week. One evening, fearing that Cindy might have tried to reach Clark while he was in the hotel, he wrote about being stuck in bad traffic in the Holland Tunnel, which has “staggeringly deficient phone reception.” Another time he wrote that Clark had to hurry to a meeting, “so he jumped quickly into a yellow taxi when I was on my way back from picking up Mighty so I have no way that is indisputably solid to know where he was going to or who he was seeing. But I am unequivocal in my believe that he was going to a very crucial meeting.”
He carried the blue notebook with him at all working hours, and presented it to Cindy every morning so she could read it on her way to work. Sometimes she appeared to read every detail, nodding and referencing previous pages. Always, she gave it back to him with no comment besides a quick thanks and a reminder to keep writing.
“I will continue writing, madam,” he always said as he held the door open for her to step out of the car. “Have a great day, madam.”
And her days did seem to be getting great, right from around when he began submitting the entries to her.
Phone calls with her friends were no longer peppered with teary whispers about “what he’s doing to me” and doubts about “how much longer I can go on like this.” She was laughing a little more, and by the time Jende gave her three weeks’ worth of entries, she was laughing a lot more, and louder. Her looks did not return to where they’d been the year before (her skin, though still supple-looking, had lost some of its glow, and her collarbones were sticking out even higher), and she did not stop talking about Vince, worrying that he hadn’t responded to her email in three days, but she found reasons to smile, like the fact that June and Mike had reconciled, and she and Mighty and Clark were going to St. Barths for Christmas. It should be a wonderful time, she told her friends, and Jende fervently wished so, too, because after months of hearing her groan and sigh, and watching her rest her head against the window with her hand on her cheek and her eyes on the blissful world outside, shake her head, and dejectedly say, whatever, Clark, do whatever you want; after seeing too much of the persistent pain she concealed so splendidly when she wasn’t around her family and closest friends, he very badly wanted the madam to have a wonderful time.
Which was what she seemed to have had when she and Clark attended a gala at the Waldorf Astoria the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Clark’s parents had come for the holiday, along with his sister and nieces, and days later, Mighty had told Jende what an awesome Thanksgiving his family had had. They had celebrated it with June’s family, as they always did (the two families alternated hosting duties every year), and his mother and grandmother and aunt had cooked and baked all day, laughing and telling stories in the kitchen. It was the first Thanksgiving his dad’s family had spent together in forever, because with his grandparents in California and his aunt and cousins in Seattle, it had been hard to get everyone together, considering work schedules and his dad and aunt’s shared hatred of holiday travel. But this year everyone said they had to do it, and it had been so much fun. Jende was surprised to learn that Cindy and her mother-in-law loved each other, because in Limbe mothers-in-law were often the reason wives stayed up at night crying, but Mighty had told him that no, his mom called his grandparents “Mom and Dad” and always made sure to phone them at least once a month as well as on their birthdays and wedding anniversary. She always insisted Mighty and Vince do the same, and whenever they forgot, she scolded them and reminded them that family was everything.